The Experiences of Homeless People with Bureaucratic Encounters: From Burdens to Intermediation

The paper analyzes the encounters of people experiencing homelessness with public services in Brazil. The number of people experiencing homelessness almost doubled in the country, in the last 5 years, reaching 221.113, in 2023. The growth is due to a combination of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, persistent economic crisis, and the absence of effective public policies. In the homeless population, blacks (69%) and people with disabilities (14%) are overrepresented, when compared to their share in the overall population (55% and 8%, respectively). As a social group that has been historically kept invisible, homeless people accumulate multiple social disadvantages. While they are one of the neediest groups in terms of public support, they also face incredible hurdles in accessing it.

The research is based on fieldwork, carried out for seven months in downtown Brasília, through which we interacted with 51 people experiencing homelessness; observed 120 encounters they had with different kinds of public services (ranging from access to documentation to health care, social assistance and housing); and performed in-depth interviews with 14 of them. Theoretical debates on the sociology of public encounters, with a special emphasis on the interfaces of street-level bureaucracy and the reproduction of social inequalities inspired the qualitative analysis. The findings point to an inventory of the main hurdles people experiencing homeless face when they seek support from public services, the strategies and situated knowledge they mobilize when responding to them, as well as the consequences of delays, targeted burdens, and exclusion for their lives and social trajectories. Moreover, we puzzled about the presence of a variety of social actors (from peers to NGOs) that play the role of an intermediary, forging the connections between street-level bureaucrats and the homeless, indicating that we need to renovate analytical lenses to think these encounters with the bureaucratic system.